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breaking news

City Hall once housed theater group

Last week we started to tell you about Lake Worth City Hall’s previous life as an auditorium.

By 1961, one article said, the building housed “the city’s teenagers club (and) a radio club, and the Lake Worth Playhouse performs here. It has a recreation room and space is allotted to the Coast Guard for a boating course and to the Visiting Nurses Association. Several shuffleboard courts on the grounds receive daylong play, and folks wishing to just relax in the shade just use the area as a meeting place.”

In 1972, the Playhouse moved to the nearby Oak-ley Theater. The city had briefly considered razing the building for more parking. Instead, it voted to move over City Hall offices from 414 Lake Avenue. That building had served as an elementary school until June 1928.

The move to the auditorium building was completed in 1973.

The third-floor continued to be an auditorium. But in July 1979, city commissioners voted to chop it up into office space.

Now City Manager Michael Bornstein walks among file cabinets and boxes. He opens a door to a closet and points to green concrete and wood molding up a side wall. That was the proscenium, the arch that framed the stage.

“You can imagine the actors and roadies and everything,” Bornstein said during a recent tour. Pointing:
“This would be stage door left. This would be like standing in the middle of the stage.”

In what had been the third-floor foyer: an original glass lamp covering.

One stairway leads to what might have been a balcony or might have been the “colored section.”

Bornstein would love to move city hall — and, in the process, consolidate its far-flung offices — “and return this to public space;” bringing back performances on the third floor and perhaps moving the city’s museum from the old city hall site on Lake Avenue, now a city annex, to the first two floors of this complex.

Bornstein’s realistic; he worked on the project to save the old 1916 Palm Beach County Courthouse.

A $19-million project to remove the wraparound and restore the original courthouse led to its March 2008 opening as the Richard and Pat John-son Palm Beach County History Museum. That effort, Bornstein noted, took 13 years.

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